Is it Cheating to Use an Exoskeleton for Aim Assist?

When does an exploit become a cheat? Players love to exploit game mechanics to gain an edge and many of them, like the classic rocket jump, are deemed acceptable by the community. But some “exploits” are clearly just cheating, such as using external aim assist software in a first-person shooter. There is no clear line between the two, but Nick Zetta of the Basically Homeless YouTube channel decided it isn’t cheating if all game input goes through his own body. That led him to building this exoskeleton aim assist device.

This is a motorized exoskeleton that Zetta can wear on his right arm, which forces his wrist and index finger to move. A camera system looks at the screen, finds the target, moves his wrist and therefore the mouse, and then, when the crosshair is over the target, it moves his finger to click. Zetta built the exoskeleton specifically for use in Aimlabs and because only his on skin makes contact with the mouse, he doesn’t consider it cheating. We’ll let you decide for yourself if you agree, but this is all for fun, so don’t take it too seriously.

A motor, paired with an encoder and controlled by an electric skateboard electronic speed controller, pivots the wrist joint. A solenoid pushes the finger. Those are controlled by an NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX Super through a Teensy 4.1 development board.

It is probably prudent to note that you should be careful if you attempt something like this. There are electric motors with enough torque to break fingers and wrists. So, don’t accidentally dismember yourself.

The big challenge was recognizing on-screen targets and responding fast enough to outperform a human without augmentation. That requires very low latency and Zetta was shooting for less than 25ms from “target appears onscreen” to the mouse click. He initially tried that with a USB camera, but found that even with a YOLO model optimized as a tensor, the response was too slow.

But then he found a better solution: a faster camera connected through the CSI (Camera Serial Interface) port. That has faster speeds and also lets the video stream bypass the Jetson’s CPU to jump right into the tensor. The new setup yielded blazing fast latency of 17ms, which is pretty incredible.

Zetta was easily able to beat his old record and achieve an Aimlabs score of 221,076, putting him in second place on the leaderboard. That was just behind exohkay, which makes you wonder what kind of crazy augmentation that person was using.